


Obsession, Possession, and a Proposition

by ThisPeep



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AWF (Angst Without Fluff), Angst, I'm not sure it counts as "graphic" but definitely not glazed over description of suicide, M/M, but warning nonetheless, its implied jim was in his past and then not brought up again, lots of death romanticization, sherlock and jim have a very very codependent obsessive and intense relationship, think it lasts a sentence maybe two, very super brief mention of rape warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 10:26:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4176384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisPeep/pseuds/ThisPeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hearing his name had been a spark and seeing him had been fire and just a touch had been lightening and all Jim wanted was to burn them both to the ground after rising them up as high into the heavens as they could go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obsession, Possession, and a Proposition

They’d met back in first year. Advanced Psychology. Jim took it because he wanted to, Sherlock because it was a prerequisite. 

They’d met back when they were kids. Jim had caught his questions, his fuss about the shoes. And his name. _Sherlock Holmes_. He’d shivered when he first said it, into the silence of his room that night. Sherlock Holmes. It wasn’t until years on that he’d shiver saying that name, the attraction to the silly letters with such a strong gorgeous concept attached growing with age.

They’d met back in Advanced Psychology. During roll call Jim’s eyes had widened when he’d heard the name and when a dark voice say “Here” he almost choked, eyes finding the speaker and god but did the attraction only strengthen.

To Sherlock, they’d met a few months into the semester. It was a party and Jim moved in close and he’d offered drugs with the quiet implication that payment could made in a bedroom and Sherlock had happily complied, two gifts in one night.

 

Jim had been different, though. His taunts were always just a bit too accurate for Sherlock to be comfortable with. (“What, have a brother that wouldn’t approve of you getting ridden by a high boy?”) Or for Sherlock not to be intrigued by. For the first time, he’d asked for someone’s number. (Jim had wanted to carve it into Sherlock’s skin and lick up the blood. He settled for writing it on Sherlock’s arm with a red pen.)

They didn’t date, of course. Jim was far too busy sleeping with other people to consider the concept of monogamy, and Sherlock wasn’t interested in romance. But they obsessed. Couldn’t be in the same room for half a minute without touching, without disappearing somewhere else for ten minutes. 

They discussed everything they could think of that wasn’t personal or that they could pretend wasn’t. Ethics. Murder. Ink. Blood. Bombs. Violence. Crimes. Bisexuality. (Pansexuality, next, as Jim learned what in the world that was.) Rape had come up exactly once and Jim’s atypically clumsy attempts to change the topic subtly had stopped Sherlock from talking about it again. 

 

Throughout the games Jim giggled. He laughed and revered at how much more clever Sherlock had become since university, since they parted ways. (It’d torn Jim apart but he knew it was for the best. Sherlock hadn’t and he’d reacted viciously, cruelly, making Jim bleed against a wall and covering him with marks and he’d have likely chained him up if Jim hadn’t brought along a bottle of chloroform and vanished completely by the time Sherlock had woken up. All records of him even being at the school had been misplaced or erased as well.)

Jim hadn’t wanted John there during the reunion, but the bitch soldier had proved to get in the way too much. And Jim was absolutely ravished with delight at Sherlock’s face when he’d thought his only friend had betrayed him. It’d stay in his dreams for years.  
Sherlock had recognized Jim, of course. And everything had clicked.

 

A week later Jim was braced against an alley wall, brick cutting into his forearms as he and Sherlock shared a proper reunion. They’d retired to Jim’s main flat afterwards and Sherlock interrogated Jim, much to Jim’s glee, and Jim told him everything. How he had set up their technical first meeting, the one at the party. How he’d obsessed over Sherlock his whole life. How he was already halfway in love with him, why he’d left. Jim told Sherlock how far his network reached, how every day without Sherlock had been an eternity, the suicide attempts, the failures, how it all felt worth it then. Jim told Sherlock about moaning his name in bed with other people and had to pause telling Sherlock things for another seven minutes because it was hard to talk through moans and harder still to talk with another’s tongue in your mouth.

It all fell into place so perfectly. It was all so incredibly worth it. In university he’d captivated Sherlock and entranced him but now it was so much more. Since Jim’d first heard his name he’d been Sherlock’s; this had made Sherlock Jim’s right back. Being the criminal mastermind behind it all. Having threads everywhere. Playing god so easily with so many people’s lives.

(Sherlock didn’t have to tell Jim his past. Jim knew it all. There were a few stories Sherlock told that Jim hadn’t known, half forgotten remembrances that amused and delighted but weren’t important to the main parts of Sherlock’s tale. Things Sherlock hadn’t told anyone else. Sherlock told Jim what he’d been _thinking_ , though, and that was everything Jim wanted.)

 

They met up constantly. Whenever they could both get away. They pushed times and schedules and meetings when the other was free-- Jim didn’t have anyone who’d be able to know he cared about knowing, or who didn’t already, and he didn’t do subtle when it came to Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock had to keep suspicion off of him from Lestrade and Mycroft and John and so they couldn’t meet up as often as they’d like. As Jim was able to. As Sherlock craved to. But they made do with texts and video calls and pictures in the meantime.

(And it was a deeper obsession than what’d been in university. That had been obsession based on wanting to know more-- now they both did know more, had interacted more, and it’d grown into something dangerous and monstrous but they both had a strong habit of fucking their demons with tangled sheets and scars from past times and not being able to bring themselves to care.)

 

Jim is obsessed with death, even with Sherlock around. If anything, he’s more so. While kissing Sherlock he imagines bleeding out, imagines being covered in pints of Sherlock’s blood while the world falls cold and dark. Recalls his almosts, when he was so close to that bliss, adds it to what he knows of feeling Sherlock bleed on top of him and almost comes without any touch but lips and the lingering love of endings.

Sherlock knows. He’d know whether or not Jim told him, but Jim still tells him. They mix uppers and downers and Jim mouths along Sherlock’s throat while musing about slitting it. He asks Sherlock if he’d ever kill him. Sherlock says no and Jim pouts, refused his dessert for the evening. 

Sherlock knows the only reason Jim hasn’t attempted since Sherlock appeared is because he’s waiting. Sherlock isn’t free of suicidal thoughts. They don’t haunt him oft anymore, far more common in his younger years, and Jim is waiting until Sherlock wants to act on them.

 

They flirt with suicide. They fake it and run off together, spend days in a haze of sex and gorgeous mental stimuli. Jim does everything he can to make Sherlock happy while hoping with all of his being every night that that’s the one Sherlock’ll fall too depressed to carry on. Sherlock doesn’t get both of these desires existing at once. To make Sherlock always interested and excited and holding his breath while also wanting him to get so low he wants to die.

Jim doesn’t understand how they’re different wants at all. He wants to make Sherlock so happy that he becomes suicidal. Sherlock doesn’t press the train of thought, afraid that Jim will note the logical fault and start to tear Sherlock apart at the seams. 

 

Jim murmurs sweet threats in Sherlock’s ear at night. Talks of torturing him and picking him apart. Sherlock is ever concerned about how much he doesn’t mind, about the thrill it gives him to know he spends most of his time and most of his care and affection on a man who wants him dead, but not enough to ask Jim to stop. Not enough to stop himself from encouraging Jim with half-involuntary sighs and hums. 

The line between them blurs, sometimes. With drugs that makes them thrum to the same beat of the stars of pulse to the movement of the universe and fuck like glaciers it's hard to differentiate. After being inside of and around and constantly touching Jim for hours it’s just them, and them feels more like just him. The two parts of him.

At those times he gets why Jim feels like dying. Why Jim wants everything to cease. When they’re not fighting, when an employee isn’t doing something stupid or a client tries to doublecross, when nothing’s going horribly wrong and there’s drugs and touching it’s bliss. It’s bliss that Jim feels in every part of him, that Sherlock feels. Complete understanding. Perfection. No where to go, nothing better to gain. Nothing to look forward to other than the continuation of a heavenly hell. Nothing to live for.

Jim obstinately refused to let Sherlock kill himself while high, though. He insists they both have to be sober, they both have to want it.

Years drag on. Jim writes epitaphs for them and years for Sherlock to agree, but still refuses his agreement when he’s not free from intoxicants.

 

He only gets more desperate, and every time they get high Sherlock is convinced that that time will be the one Jim doesn’t care enough anymore and that they won’t live to see the sunrise.

Sherlock always wakes up the next day, pressed against a still-living Jim. He doesn’t understand. He never does when Jim’s involved.

 

Sherlock slips his arms around Jim and places sweet kisses on the side of his neck. Jim tilts his head acceptingly and melts into the touch. Sherlock tells Jim he loves him and there’s a beat before Jim says the same back. (Hadn’t been said before, not quite like that. There’d been ‘I can’t get you out of my mind’ and ‘you’re all I’ve ever wanted’ and Jim’s ‘I’d already half fallen for you by the time I first met you in person’ but never love, never fully, never in the present. Jim smiles softly, and he knows what it means.)

 

They die in bed. Not on any anniversary or holiday. Jim asks Sherlock why he chose that day, before they cut. 

Sherlock wasn’t sure why. It felt like it clicked. He felt like he could never be close enough to Jim when they were still alive. He felt like he needed more.

Jim split into a grin and there were tears in his eyes and he was so, so relieved that Sherlock finally understood. They dragged metal through flesh-- and it had to be suicide, not murder, so it was their own hands that pulled blades that pulled their blood-- and they pressed closer, painfully close, and their mouths fused together. Moving, needing, demanding. They couldn’t get close enough.

No one interrupted. The sheets and mattress were soaked with red and no one stopped them, saved them. (It wouldn’t have been saving to them, anyway, but ruining.)  
Jim died in a state of bliss higher than anything he’d felt before. Far, far, better than anything he’d felt while sober. Of course, though, he was free of anything that day. Free of uppers, alcohol, nicotine. Eventually blood. He died happier than he’d ever lived.

 

Sherlock died terrified. But he died in love with a man he couldn’t bear to keep from experiencing the one thing he truly wanted in life one more night. And in every touch and sound and heartbeat he could feel Jim was buzzing with euphoria, and it was worth Sherlock’s fear.

Sherlock died as he’d lived, mostly. Pleasing Jim Moriarty as best he could, especially at his own sake.

**Author's Note:**

> so I found a fic in my drafts titled "I Am Now Sad" and read it and... I don't remember writing half the things I write but ok this one hurt to read without remembering how it ended. So I'm sharing the pain


End file.
